Outgoing WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has recently criticized EU-US and transpacific trade talks, which have the potential to create the world’s two largest free trade areas and measurably increase prosperity and growth for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. He has a point. Several, actually.

For all its faults, the pharmaceutical industry remains one area in which the United States is still a competitive world leader. But without drastic changes in the way the FDA regulates the industry, this advantage may not last.

I met Taymor Kamrany in 2003, just over a year after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan had ousted the Taliban. We were both in Kabul, working on a USAID program to improve the environment for business and help government institutions rebuild their capacity to support a market economy. It was not an easy task.

I can recall when taking a flight in Africa would almost always give you a funny or hair-raising story to tell, even though paved runways were already standard issue in airports throughout the continent, but traveling around Africa is now pretty boring, which is a good thing.

About 10 days ago I sat at breakfast in Lomé, the capital of Togo, a sliver of a country in West Africa, watching French TV news of the capture, and what turned out to be false reports of the liberation, of seven French tourists in northern Cameroon by the Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram. It was hard not to feel concerned about the future of this part of the world.

Jeffrey Sachs, writing in yesterday’s Financial Times, has neatly identified the culprit in the U.S. fiscal sequester, which went into effect at noon today. It is not the Tea Party, nor even the House Republican leadership, but Obama himself, counterintuitive as that may appear.

Slavish obedience to tradition is never a good thing, but neither is its wanton disregard. So what are we to make of the recent announcement by the International Olympic Committee that wrestling, one of the original sports in both the ancient and modern Olympic Games, is to be dropped as a core sport?

After watching from the sidelines for nearly two years, many of the world’s political and opinion leaders are now calling for the West to supply arms to the Syrian rebels. British Prime Minister David Cameron has spoken of a “strategic imperative” to act, at least in part to prevent extreme jihadist groups from eclipsing more moderate factions.